Explosion in a Cathedral, page 27
Chapter Five
With or without reason.
Goya
XXXV.
“You!” Sofía exclaimed when she saw that grown man, his frame broader now, with hard, uncared-for hands, burnt by the sun, carrying his scant possessions like a sailor in a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. “You!” And she kissed him passionately on his poorly shaved cheeks, on his forehead, on his neck. “You!” Esteban said, amazed, shocked to see the woman he was now embracing, a woman in full, so firm, so consummate, so different from the narrow-hipped girl whose image he had carried in his mind—the girl who had been too much of a mother to be a cousin, too much of a girl to be a woman: an unsexed playmate, solace in his crises, that was the Sofía of before. He looked around now, rediscovering everything, but with the dogged feeling of being a foreigner. He, who had so dreamed of the moment of return, didn’t feel the expected emotion. Everything he once knew so well seemed strange to him, and he was incapable of reestablishing intimacy with all that surrounded him. Here he saw the harp of other days, at the foot of the tapestry with the cockatoos, unicorns, and greyhounds; there the great beveled lamps and the Venetian mirror, with its flowers of mist; there, the library, its tomes neatly arranged. Sofía followed him to the dining room with its heavy furnishings and varnished still lifes of pheasants and hares lying among fruits. He passed the kitchens to the neighboring bedroom that had been his since his childhood. “Wait, I’ll go for the key,” Sofía said. (Esteban recalled that in these old homes of Spanish families it was a custom to lock forever the bedrooms of the dead.) When the door opened, he saw a dusty concatenation of puppets and scientific paraphernalia, scattered over the floor, the chairs, the iron cot that had been the bed of his torments for so long. The faded Montgolfier balloon still hung from its cord; the little theater stage was still here with its decor of a Mediterranean port, good for playacting The Impostures of Scapin. There, surrounding the monkey orchestra, lay the broken Leyden jars, barometers, and communicating vessels of before. That reencounter with childhood—or with a childhood prolonged through adolescence, which was the same thing—broke Esteban, and he began to sob. He cried a long time, head sunken in Sofía’s lap, the same way he had turned to her in grief in his days as an infirm, ill-suited to living. Forgotten ties were reestablished. They began to talk of certain objects. They returned to the salon through the vestibule adorned with paintings. There were the harlequins livening up carnivals and pilgrimages to Cythera; the still lifes of pots, fruit bowls, two apples, a piece of bread, a wild leek, by some imitator of Chardin, glowed timeless and beautiful beside the monumental canvas of the deserted square, the airless technique of which—with its lack of atmospheric densities—owed much to the style of Jean Antoine Caron. Hogarth’s fantastical figures were still in their place, and past them the Decapitation of Saint Denis, the colors of which, far from fading amid the glow of the Tropics, seemed to have taken on an extraordinary brilliance. “We recently had them restored and varnished,” Sofía said. “I can tell,” said Esteban. “The blood here looks fresh.” As they walked on, he saw new oils where scenes of reaping and harvests had hung before, done in a cold style with stolid brushwork, depicting edifying scenes from Ancient History, Tarquinades and Lycurgeries of the same sort that had so dismayed Esteban during his final years in France. “You have these things here, too?” he asked. “This is the art that people like now,” Sofía replied. “There’s something more than color here: these works contain ideas; they offer models to live by; they make you think.” Esteban stopped, deeply shaken, before the Explosion in a Cathedral by an anonymous Neapolitan master. It seemed to prefigure so many events he had witnessed, and he felt staggered by the endless interpretations this prophetic canvas invited—anti-plastic, estranged from all known pictorial subjects, brought into their home by an obscure coincidence. If the cathedral was, according to doctrines he had learned long ago, the representation—ark and tabernacle—of his own being, an explosion had occurred within it, however deferred and gradual, shattering altars, symbols, and objects of veneration. If the cathedral was the Age, then a formidable explosion had collapsed its supporting walls, burying beneath an avalanche of rubble the very men who may have built the infernal machine. If the cathedral was the Church, then there was, Esteban noticed, a row of robust columns still intact while just past it, another crumbled and collapsed—and this was an augur of resistance, endurance, and renewal after an epoch of devastation and stars foretelling doom. “You always did like to stare at that painting,” Sofía said, “and I always found it disagreeable and, frankly, absurd!” “Ours is a disagreeable and absurd age,” Esteban responded. Then, remembering suddenly he had another cousin, he asked after Carlos. “He went out early with my husband to the fields,” Sofía said. “They’ll be back later.” And the expression of stupor, of aggrieved astonishment, on Esteban’s face left her at a loss. Taking a light and unworried tone, uncharacteristically verbose, she told him how, a year ago, she had married the man who was now Carlos’s associate in the business—and she pointed toward the door set deep in the wall that led to the courtyard where the two palms stood like columns that had wandered away from the house. Carlos had sacked Don Cosme after the end of the anti-Masonic delirium—which remained, in the end, a series of idle threats—and soon began searching for a partner possessed of the experience and knowledge of commerce he lacked, one who would bring these to the company in exchange for a significant percentage of their revenues. And he met at the Lodge a man both talented and well versed in economic matters. “The Lodge?” Esteban asked. “Let me continue,” Sofía said, devoting a panegyric to the man who had restructured the company not long after joining, and had made the most of the country’s present affluence, tripling, quadrupling the warehouse’s profits. “You’re rich now!” she shouted to Esteban, cheeks bright with enthusiasm. “Well and truly rich! And you, we, have Jorge to thank for it. We’ve been married for a year. His grandparents were Irish. He’s related to the O’Farrils.” Esteban found repulsive Sofía’s invocation of one of the most notable and powerful families on the island. “You must be throwing lots of parties now?” he asked, contemptuous. “Don’t be a fool! Nothing’s changed. Jorge is no different from us. You’ll get along well with him.” She told him how content she was, what good fortune it was to make a man happy, how safe, how tranquil a woman felt when she had a companion. And, she added, as if seeking forgiveness for her betrayal: “You and Carlos are men. You will start a home of your own one day. Don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you, everything is just as it was before.” But he regarded her with enormous sorrow. Never could he have expected to hear this rigmarole of bourgeois commonplaces coming from Sofía’s lips: to make a man happy, how tranquil a woman feels when she has a companion in life. He was horrified at the thought that a second brain, situated in her womb, was uttering its own ideas through Sofía’s mouth—Sofía, whose name defined its bearer as possessor of a cheerful wisdom, a gay science. In Esteban’s imagination, Sofía’s name had always appeared beneath the shadows of the great cupola of Byzantium; wound in branches of the Tree of Life, surrounded by Archons, inseparable from the great mystery of the Woman Intact. And now, physical contentment, borne, perhaps, of still concealed jubilation at an incipient pregnancy—announced by the cessation of an outflow of blood that had poured from deep springs since the time of puberty—had sufficed to make a good wife of the Older Sister, the Young Mother, the clean feminine entelechy of before, a woman consequent and measured, mind centered on her Sheltered Womb and on the future comfort of its Fruits, proud to have a husband related to an oligarchy that owed its riches to the centuries-long exploitation of gigantic gangs of negroes. If Esteban had felt strange—a foreigner—on entering his house once more, stranger still—more foreign still—did he feel before that woman, that queen, that mistress of a house where everything, for his tastes, was too orderly, too clean, too safe from blows and injury. “Everything here smells of the Irish,” Esteban said to himself, asking permission (yes, permission) to take a bath, and Sofía accompanied him, as was their custom, and stayed talking to him until he had nothing left to remove but his breeches. “All this secrecy over a thing I’ve seen who knows how many times,” she said, laughing, and tossed him a bar of Castilian soap over the screen. They lunched alone, after Esteban, taking a turn through the kitchen and pantry, had embraced Rosaura and Remigio, boisterous and jovial, just as he had left them: she in fine form, he in that indeterminate middle age of the negro destined to endure a full hundred years of life in the kingdoms of this world. They spoke little, or they spoke of trifles, looking at each other a great deal, with so many things to say that none managed to take shape. Esteban alluded vaguely to the places he had been, never lingering over details. When the climate of intimacy dissipated by his long absence was finally restored, and he began to talk in earnest, he would need hours, days, to take a verbal inventory of his experiences in those convulsive and frenzied years. They seemed short to him, the years, now that they lay behind him. And yet, they had aged certain things tremendously: certain books, above all. Encountering Abbé Raynal on the library shelves made him want to laugh. Baron d’Holbach, Marmontel with his comic-opera Incas, Voltaire with his tragedies that had seemed so subversive, so contemporary, just ten years before, all struck him as remote, out of time—as outmoded as a fourteenth-century Pharmacopeia. But nothing for him was so anachronistic, so splintered, fissured, diminished by events, as The Social Contract. He opened their copy, its pages full of admiring interjections, glosses, notes, traced out in his own handwriting—his handwriting from before. “Remember?” Sofía said, leaning her head on his shoulder. “I didn’t understand it back then. Now I understand it well.” The two of them ascended to the upstairs rooms. Esteban stopped at that symbol of shared intimacy with an unknown party, the broad and yet all-too narrow marriage bed, each of its nightstands laden with different sorts of books, with cordovan house shoes laid next to Sofía’s slippers. Again, he felt himself a foreigner. When she offered him the neighboring room—it used to be Jorge’s study, but he never used it—Esteban instead returned to his room from before; piling the scientific contraptions, music boxes, and puppets in a corner, he hung his hammock from the two rings embedded in the walls—the same ones that once held the sheet twisted like a noose where he would rest his head during his asthma attacks. Sofía then asked him about Victor Hugues. “Don’t speak to me of Victor Hugues,” the man said, looking into his sailor’s sacks. “I have a letter from him for you. He turned into a monster on us.” And tucking a few coins in his pocket, he went outside. He was eager to breathe the air of a city that had struck him as very changed when he disembarked. After a brief walk, he found himself standing before the Cathedral with its sober entablatures of maritime stone—already rich in antique tones before the stone carvers had touched it—crowned by subdued baroque flourishes. That church, amid palaces with balconies and grilles, showed an evolution in the tastes of those who reigned over the architectural fate of the city. He walked until dusk, straying through the Calle de los Oficios, the Calle del Inquisidor, the Calle de Mercaderes, crossing from the Plaza del Cristo to the Church of the Holy Spirit, from the renovated Alameda de Paula to the Plaza de Armas, and beneath its arcades, congregating at dusk, he saw the aimless transients engaged in fevered conversation. Dimwits gathered at the windows of a house to hear the novel sounds of a pianoforte brought recently from Europe. Barbers strummed guitars in the doorways of their shops. In a courtyard could be seen the deceptive spectacle of a talking head. Whoring themselves for the benefit of some very Catholic, very honorable lady—a practice common in the city—two succulent slaves solicited him as he passed. Esteban touched his coins, felt the weight of them in his hands, and accompanied both into the shadows of a dodgy inn . . . It was night when he returned home. Carlos hurried to embrace him. He was little changed: a bit more mature, a bit more self-important—perhaps a little bit fatter. “We businessmen lead a sedentary life . . .” he said, laughing. Then Sofía brought out her husband: a thin man who could have passed for twenty-five despite his thirty-three years, his face was handsome, with fine and noble features, his mouth sensual if slightly imperious. Apprehensive of encountering a small-minded, garrulous, and superficial merchant’s apprentice, Esteban was impressed by this character, even as he observed in his carriage, attitudes, and dress the sort of affected, condescending seriousness, cool deference, and slight melancholy which—along with a preference for dark garments, broad, loose collars, and ostentatiously unkempt hair—was a trait of the young men who, for the past few years, had been educated in Germany or—as in the present case—in England. “Don’t tell me he isn’t handsome,” Sofía ventured, looking at her husband with tender admiration . . . The lady of the house had set out that night a great abundance of candelabra and silver for the first dinner since the family was reunited. “I see you’ve slain the fatted calf,” Esteban said on seeing the finest fowl garnished with the most elaborate sauces on a series of platters, reminding him of dinners the three adolescents had treated themselves to in that dining room long before, dreaming of being in the Palace of Potsdam, the baths of Carlsbad, or some rococo palace on the outskirts of an imaginary Vienna. Sofía said such galantines, such croutons, such truffled stuffing and sherry sauces were suited to one who, after living in Europe, must have a deeply refined palate, trained in the ponderation of the exquisite. But looking back, Esteban was forced to confess—he had never thought about it before—that his initial astonishment at the pyrotechnics of a cuisine dense with aromas, nuances, subtleties of fat, alloys of herbs, the phantom aftertaste of essences, had been brief. Perhaps because he’d had to content himself for months on the peppers, bacalao, and pilpil of the Basques, Esteban had grown used to the cooking of hunters and seamen, and preferred the flavor of honest ingredients to what he called, with a marked contempt for sauces, sludgy fare. He sang the praises of the batata, perfumed and clean when cooked under ash; of green plantains glazed with oil; of hearts of palm; thick stalks of asparagus, long and pliant like trees; of boucans of roasted turtle and grilled wild boar; of sea urchin and mangrove oysters; of fresh gazpacho with soldiers’ bread; and of baby crabs whose fried carapaces broke apart between your teeth, seasoned with the sea salt of their own flesh. Above all, he recalled sardines caught in nets, thrown still alive on the coals of a camp stove at the end of a midnight catch, devoured on deck with raw onions and black bread, and between bites, drafts from a wineskin full of thick, rustic red. “I tortured myself all afternoon studying cookbooks to listen to this,” Sofía said, laughing . . . Coffee was served in the grand salon, where Esteban missed the disorder of former days. The grandchild of the Irish and Consort of the Lady of the House had evidently imposed certain standards of formality in the mansion. Sofía, moreover, was exceedingly attentive to his inclinations, going, coming, bringing matches for his pipe, sitting on a little footstool next to his armchair. There was a feeling in the husband’s silence, in Carlos’s smiling expectancy, in Sofía’s undue restlessness—now she had gone off again to get a cushion—that all were waiting for Esteban to begin, like a voyager of old, the saga of his adventures. For them, situated at an enormous remove from events, he was like a Sir John Mandeville of the Revolution. But the words rose only with difficulty to his mouth, when he thought of how the first ones would bring forth so many more until dawn surprised him there, still sitting on that same divan, still talking. “Tell about Victor Hugues,” Carlos said at last. Seeing that tonight, Ulysses would not be freed from narrating his Odyssey, Esteban told Sofía: “Bring me a bottle of your cheapest wine, and chill another one for afterward, because this story will be a long one.”
